Dissecting the Anatomy of a Commercial
By Bob Fisher

Originally appeared in Film & Video in 1995

People are starting to call commercials a one second medium, because some studies indicate that's how long channel surfers will wait before deciding they aren't interested. One second translates to 24 images. There is a special art to shooting commercials. You have to tell a story, deliver a memorable message, and make a good impression. In this article, Fred Elmes, ASC, dissects the anatomy of a unique commercial that he photographed in England. Elmes is an eclectic cinematographer with a long list of feature and commercial credits.

His feature credits include Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Night on Earth and Reckless, a recently completed film for the Playhouse Pictures.

QUESTION: Who was the sponsor?

ELMES: The sponsor is Guinness. They have a new draft ale called Enigma. It is sold in a can which has a device called a Widget that assures a stable head. We produced a 40 second TV spot, and a one minute version for cinemas. Both will initially be released in England in February.

QUESTION: There probably aren't too many Americans shooting commercials in England for release in England.

ELMES: The director (Michael Hausman) and I worked together before on a Citroen commercial that was filmed in Paris. He's an American who lives in England, and works with The Artist Company. He does very innovative work.

QUESTION: Is that what appealed to you?

ELMES: Yes. He has an interesting style. He described his vision, and made me feel comfortable about expressing my ideas. I also like shooting commercials in other countries because it exposes me to a variety of different approaches to solving problems.

QUESTION: How is shooting in Europe different?

ELMES: Agencies rely much more on the director's vision, and because of that, you aren't locked into shooting every frame of the storyboard if he or she has a better idea. The concept for the Guinness commercial came from the ad agency. Michael expanded it, and gave me a lot of freedom.

QUESTION: What's the basic theme?

ELMES: The commercial is based on images from Salvador Dali paintings. Michael selected the images and convinced the agency that we could combine five or six different elements from Dali paintings in one commercial. I used the paintings that he selected as a visual reference. Our images are very surrealistic, and because of that it required combining our photography with sophisticated digital compositing.

QUESTION: How do these particular Dali images translate to selling Enigma ale?

ELMES: The idea is to use these fantastic images to grab the attention of the audience. We used another art form to transport the audience to an unreal world. It’s a place they haven't been before.

QUESTION: How did you prepare to shoot this spot?

ELMES: After we spoke, Michael sent me loads of information, including the storyboard and color pictures. I bought Dali books, and researched others at the library. I put the pictures on a wall at home. As I looked at the images, I got ideas about how to use colors, light and shadows, and the way Dali made the sandy horizon meet the sky and clouds. I also liked the way he used elongated shadows in the foreground. We weren't trying to simply copy a painting. We wanted to borrow some of his techniques to create a mood for our film.

QUESTION: Can you describe the commercial?

ELMES: It’s only 40 seconds long, but I can't describe it that quickly. In one scene a man is walking through the desert away from the camera. We filmed the man separately and composited him into the environment. There is a desert set. It was only 60 feet deep. We had 150 tons of sand on the floor, and there are 20 foot high abstract sculptures in the foreground. The backing is about 45 feet high and 100 feet across. It has a painting of mountains on the horizon and clouds. There is also a scrim with more painted clouds in front of the backing. When we move the camera into the set, the clouds seem to move. It gives us a feeling of great depth.

QUESTION: Where does that feeling come from?

ELMES: It's forced perspective. All of the mountains on the painted background are very tiny. That creates an impression that they are much further away. We also sculpted little dunes in the sand which augment that illusion. We used a lot of visual tricks that I’m sure everyone knows. The foreground is darker, and the horizon is very bright. Your eyes naturally go to the brightest picture element on the screen. That adds to the sense of limitless depth. We were using the biggest stage at Sheperton Studios. I think it's 150 by 240 feet, and we built three desert sets for different scenes.

QUESTION: Why did you film the man separately?

ELMES: We filmed him against a blue screen background, and transferred both images to D-1 video tape. This enabled us to drop the man into the background at a reduced size. That also contributed to illusion of infinity. In one set up, the man is walking, and he sees a body of water with four men standing next to it. They lift up the edge of the water and look underneath it.

QUESTION: How did you do that?

ELMES: We built a pool so that we could photograph the surface of the water. There was also a miniature mountain in the pool which reflected in the water. We made one pass with a motion control camera on a lateral dolly track, and filmed it in real time. On the next pass, we took the pool out of the scene and photographed the mountain and textured sand instead of the water. We shot a third pass with a sleeping dog instead of the pool. There was a fourth pass with the four men and a blue rubber mat in place of the pool. They were able to pick up the mat. When the images are composited, it creates the illusion that four men lift up the water and find a sleeping dog underneath.

QUESTION: How many passes did it take?

ELMES: We made eight or nine passes for this one scene. It includes several other Dali figures as well. We had one pass where we just photographed the background painting. That allowed us to add a little atmospheric haze. This adds to the illusion by making the horizon appear a little less sharp. That also helps with the illusion.

QUESTION: How long is this one scene on the screen?

ELMES: A maximum of six and a half seconds. Probably a little less. I think there are 34 images in the 60 second spot.

QUESTION: There has to be a product shot.

ELMES: In a commercial, the star is the product, so you want it to look as appetizing as possible. We shot one take where the beer is pouring into empty air. The glass seems to form out of nothing as the beer splashes into it. A hand grabs the glass as it materializes.

QUESTION: Is it a real glass or a computer drawing?

ELMES: There were three locked off camera shots. We photographed a real glass, with beer pouring, beer pouring into the empty air, and a sky background with nothing else in it. Those elements were digitally composited. There is another scene where the man is drinking from the glass. Looking at the scene from his perspective, the audience sees a distorted image of a waiter through the head of beer. You can see the bubbles, the frost on the glass, and there is a good frothy head. Again, several different elements and motion control were used.

QUESTION: Were you interested in Dali's art before you worked on this project? And what did you discover about his art in the process of making this short film?

ELMES: I've always been fascinated by his art. I already had a couple of books with reproductions of his paintings. I discovered that many of his works, especially the early paintings, have a wonderful sense of depth. There are also many anomalies in his work. There are paintings where people cast shadows in opposite directions. We made liberal use of that idea. In one case, it was too time consuming to put the light in the right place to create the shadows we wanted. It was easier to paint hard defined shadows on the sand.

QUESTION: The paintings you used as a visual reference have pretty warm colors. Did you follow that theme?

ELMES: We made a series of telecine tests, and found appropriate colors, which are true to those in Dali's paintings, though our colors are more saturated.

QUESTION: It sounds like you had an opportunity to be an integral member of the creative team. Is that true?

ELMES: I felt like it was a completely collaborative process. The telecine transfer and digital compositing were done at Rushes, in London. They were very responsive to our ideas. We found a look by manipulating both color and black and white transfers and mixing them. This work provided the basis for photographing the spot.

QUESTION: When you are shooting a commercial that you know is going to go through a telecine process, does it influence your approach to original photography?

ELMES: The way to do this right is to go though a process of telecine testing. Luckily, we had three days of prelighting the stage, two days of testing telecine, and six days of shooting.

QUESTION: Did you do anything differently to account for the fact that there was a cinema version of the spot?

ELMES: I had to think about composing the spot for two different aspect ratios, 4:3 for PAL television, and 1.66:1 for the cinema releases. We had a double ground glass mask on the camera, and I protected the edges of the frame for the cinema commercial.

QUESTION: Realizing that the spot would be seen on a movie screen as well as a TV screen, how did you make a set with 60 feet of sand look like an infinite desert?

ELMES: It wasn't easy. I found that playing with light and dark, and experimenting with shadows, I could help the illusion. The last 10 feet of sand was ramped up about three feet higher than the 50 feet of sand in the foreground. That seemed to put the horizon in the right spot to make the illusion of infinite distance more believable. There is also a row of miniature mountains on the background painting, and some sand dunes in the foreground.

QUESTION: Was this combination of visual elements constructed by eye or is there some formula you can use?

ELMES: We did it by eye. I had never tried anything like this before. The designer, Happy Massy, and model builder, David Payne, and I took turns looking through the camera to put the elements in place. All the little things we did seemed to make a difference. The contrast, the type of backing, the placement of set pieces, the focal length of the lens, whether the dolly is moving forward into the set or laterally across it, all seem to have some bearing. Ultimately, what you see is what you get. When you look through the lens, do you believe it or not? You have to trust your instincts.

QUESTION: Going back to that forced perspective shot, what was the right focal length?

ELMES: The best solution that we found for this situation was a 25 mm lens. I think it was the right combination of the size of the person in the foreground and the distance from the horizon line.

QUESTION: Were you shooting at 24 frames a second?

ELMES: We shot 25 frames for the synch sound scenes, and the sequences where the man was walking were filmed at 30 frames a second. We wanted to slow the action down, and create an underlying feeling that something is a bit off center. When we were pouring the beer, the frame rate ranged from 60 to 90 a second. We also used strobe light to freeze the images of the beer. We found that the strobe made the bubbles and the foamy look of the head richer and more defined, especially during the pouring.

QUESTION: I understand how varying the frame rate enhances the TV image. Do you get the same affect when you project film in a theater at 24 frames a second?

ELMES: Yes, the effect is great on a big screen. The thing that we were most conscious of was that when we did the dolly moves, we got some strobing, and we worried that it would become more apparent when we transferred the video to film for the cinema release. As a result, we altered the moves we had planned, and made the sets a little bit smaller so we could cover the distance in less time.

QUESTION: Was that a result of testing or know-how?

ELMES: It was both testing and trusting our instincts about adjusting for the strobing effect.

QUESTION: Do you think the average person in the audience associates this spot with Dali?

ELMES: I think they will. The images are quite identifiable.

QUESTION: Can you explain the rationale for decisions made about the choice of colors?

ELMES: It came directly from the Dali paintings. The colors of the sand, sky and clouds were my starting point for choosing combinations of visual elements that worked together. The 150 tons of sand was a mix of five or six different colors. We mixed and matched colors to add a feeling of depth and make it more interesting. I added colors with the gels on top of that. I lit from the top with space lights which gave me a great deal of control. I could turn them on and off independently. I usually kept the horizon line very bright, and lit the figures in the foreground with separate lamps to create shadows I could control.

QUESTION: What's a space light?

ELMES: It's basically six 1K quartz globes in a four foot diameter white sock. It acts very much like a coop. In this case, they provided soft top sky light.

QUESTION: It's interesting that you have created a photographic environment to put actors into in postproduction. There seems to be a trend now to use computers to create abstract synthetic backgrounds.

ELMES: I don't think it would be the same. For example, we talked about other ways to make the surface of the water ripple, and still show the reflections of the sky and mountains. We saw examples of digitally manipulated film images of a water surface and it just wasn't as believable.

QUESTION: So unreality has to have a sense of reality?

ELMES: Right. It has to be based on reality. Dali's early work included wonderful figure studies. His technique was grounded in a traditional school of painting, and then he took it where he wanted to go. Filmmaking needs to be based on reality in order to take it in new directions.

QUESTION: Was any thought given to using digital backlots instead of filming the sets?

ELMES: Before I was involved, I'm sure the producers considered painting the backgrounds with a computer to create the desert landscape and then photograph the man and other characters against a blue or green screen. They found that it wasn't going to look as clean as shooting the film, and transferring it to D-1.

QUESTION: What was the most difficult challenge?

ELMES: I think that the hardest thing was making 60 feet of sand look like infinity. It proved to be very difficult to make that illusion work, particularly when we started to move the camera. We needed to make the audience believe absolutely that this desert goes on forever, and that this man has been walking forever.

QUESTION: What other images do you recall?

ELMES: In one scene, the man stops and looks at the landscape. He tilts his head 90 degrees, and the waiter's face is superimposed over his. Joe Dunton Camera provided us with a nodel point rollover rig. It gives you the ability to rotate the camera around the lens axis continuously. We made the same camera move on the man, the waiter and the landscape, then supered them.

QUESTION: You used the word texture when we opened this conversation. Is there a Dali texture?

ELMES: Dali used many fine details in his paintings. They show up in his deserts and mountains. We wanted to use that. We got different feelings in the sky by painting clouds with different textures.

QUESTION: In one scene the waiter's face seems to be part of the landscape, and it looks animated.

ELMES: We photographed an actor saying his dialog, and Rushes took it apart electronically, and put bits and pieces of it over the model landscape. You see a bit of an eye, an eyebrow, part of his chin, and other parts of his face. His lines are still in synch, but it’s the landscape that seems to be speaking.

QUESTION: How did you put together a crew in England?

ELMES: I got recommendations from everyone I knew who has worked in London recently, and called them. I telephoned people. We talked about the kind of work they had done, and about this project. I tried to explain the spirit of what I wanted to accomplish. It worked out very well. Tom Brown, the gaffer, brought a very good electrical crew. We rented cameras and lenses from Joe Dunton, who I knew well. We used a lot of different lenses, including macros for very tight close-ups. We also shot some film at speed, and we had some synch sound work. We used a Mitchell Mark II camera for high-speed work, and a Moviecam Compact camera for the rest.

QUESTION: What influenced your choice of camera film?

ELMES: I decided from the start to use (Eastman EXR) 5248 film, because I wanted the finest grain and the sharpest images I could get. I planned to use a little diffusion on the lens, because I like the feeling of softening the edges a little bit. I didn't want to see any electronic edges. There would be a lot of digital compositing and I wanted to keep the film look. Doing this much compositing, nets and diffusion on the lens can cause problems when you are making difference mattes.

QUESTION: What did you do?

ELMES: Looking for new ideas for the visual “look”, I rummaged through the basement of my hotel in London, and found an old window glass. It had an interesting ripple, so I had it cut to fit the camera matte box, and we shot some tests to see what affect the rippling would have on the scene. The technicians at Rushes convinced me that they could get the same look in postproduction, and that if we did it in the original photography, the electronic matting process would become very difficult. I decided to trust them. The director and I had spent weeks talking about the feeling of film, and what we could achieve naturally in the camera. We shot without diffusion to make it easier to get clean mattes and increase control in postproduction.

QUESTION: Was it worth it?

ELMES: I think so. With the acceleration of technology, we have many more options, and many more choices to make today. But the pay-off is that we can make very complex composited images and look at the results almost immediately, instead of waiting three weeks to see the opticals.

QUESTION: Do you think that this technological progress is altering the role of the cinematographer?

ELMES: Of course it is. It's our job to keep up with technology. It's a constant race to stay current. Much of the new technology can make your job easier. Still, there's a temptation to take the easy route, and say that your job is simply taking pictures. I'd rather say, look at these strange images Dali painted, and ask how can we make that three dimensional? It starts with imagination. Someone has to say, "I can make Salvador Dali paintings move and that will be fascinating." It doesn't start with technology. The people who run the motion control system are real computer wizards. They can repeat camera moves flawlessly, time after time. But, they need to be guided through the aesthetics of the shot. New technology is a tool which can be bent to suit our needs.

QUESTION: Do you believe that the audience appreciates the difference at some level?

ELMES: People may not be able to put their finger on it. They may be hard pressed to define that difference. But I think they know when they are seeing something different in commercials and music videos.

QUESTION: How different is this than shooting a movie?

ELMES: It's a different medium. It forces you to be very exact, because every frame counts, and each image must work in relationship to the next shot.

QUESTION: Do you think this type of abstract imagery is something that we're going to see more of in movies, as well as commercials?

ELMES: I hope so. I think that as our ability to manipulate images increases, feature film directors and producers will become at ease with the idea of using abstract images. It's a fascinating time to be in this industry. The telephone and cable companies are adding new dimensions to our ability to deliver images into homes. All sorts of new ground is being broken in terms of delivering images. We are just playing with it at this point. The ultimate highways for delivering images haven't been built yet. There are no rules yet.

QUESTION: We spoke earlier about the impact of remote control devices and channel surfing. Do you see an impact on the way commercials are produced occurring?

ELMES: I think people who produce commercials have to do a little more thinking about what they are doing, because it is very easy for someone at the other end of the TV screen to change channels. I believe we will see commercials that are more thought provoking. Otherwise the audience will tune out.